Amazon joins pack offering deals a week ahead of Black Friday

As of this Friday, Amazon will officially get on the bandwagon of retailers that now offer “Black Friday” deals well in advance of the actual post-Thanksgiving extravaganza.

The e-commerce giant last week announced that Black Friday deals will begin rolling out on Friday, November 17, and continue through Cyber Monday, with deals available across product categories and discounts as high as ~75%.

Kicking off the holiday sales event early has become a common practice among retailers, but Amazon until this year had stuck to the more traditional 48-hour window. Last year, for example, Amazon’s sales event didn’t begin until Thanksgiving.

“We’ve seen pretty much every retailer across the board doing these longer Black Friday sales,” Kristin McGrath, shopping expert and senior editor of RetailMeNot’s The Real Deal, told Retail Brew. “But Amazon ironically has been the most traditional about its Black Friday sale.”

Getting in on the action: Why now? McGrath said consumers are increasingly checking big items off their list earlier, and “Amazon probably wants in on that.”

Recent data backs this up. Deloitte’s annual holiday survey found that participation in promotional events is set to increase this year, as inflation-squeezed customers seek deals. The consulting firm found that 66% of consumers planned to go holiday shopping the week of Black Friday–Cyber Monday, compared to 49% in 2022.

In addition, consumers plan to wrap up their holiday shopping within 5.8 weeks this year, compared to 7.4 weeks prior to the pandemic, according to Deloitte. That would mean retailers have a shorter window to draw customers.

“The old retail adage of ‘having the right product, at the right price, at the right time’ may ring true more than ever this year,” Deloitte said in a blog post.

Amazon did not respond to a request for comment on why it chose this year to extend the sales event, but it did note in a press release that a longer window would give customers “more days and more deals to shop than last year’s event.” It also highlighted that “new deals will drop as often as every five minutes during select periods throughout the events.”

Making up the difference: Lee Peterson, EVP of thought leadership and marketing at consulting firm WD Partners, explained in an email that retailers might also be trying to make up for the fact that more businesses now close on Thanksgiving.

Back in 2021, for example, Target announced that it would be closing on Thanksgiving “permanently” after kicking off the practice during the pandemic. Other retailers, such as Best Buy, joined the trend just last year.

But Peterson warned that all this Black Friday promotional activity could risk exhausting the public on the whole idea of the sales event. “They’re literally going to kill Black Friday itself,” he told Retail Brew, “if they don’t stop saying it’s ‘Black Friday weekend NOW.’”

McGrath said making consumers feel as though they are being hit with an endless flurry of promotions is partly the point.

“I think a lot of this is deliberately chaotic on the part of retailers because they really do want consumers to get into that deal frenzy [and] keep checking back and maybe buy something they weren’t planning on,” she said.